Features

News Releases

(EQ) How Tom Brutnell Balances Research and Application

Tuesday, 02 February 2016As the global population increases, agricultural yields must increase to feed the world’s population. Compounding the explosive population growth is the decreasing available tillable land [as subdivisions and industrial parks expand into former farmland.

Brutnell has been in St. Louis for four years, but his work in the AgTech field began more than a decade ago in New York, as part of the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University.

“When I was at Cornell, it was really at the beginning of what we call the genomics era,” he says. “I was recruited with about eight other faculty to the Cornell campus around 1998-2001 as part of their genomic initiative. It was a very exciting time in plant genetics as high-throughput sequencing was getting off the ground and it was possible to look at the expression of all the genes in the genome. I could see the impact this work would have on agriculture.”